THE LIMITS OF STATE-DUTIES. 643 



appropriate for times to come. Yet it needs but to go back to 

 the remote past, when industrial life was held contemptible and 

 virtue meant fortitude, valor, bravery ; or to the less remote past 

 when noble meant high-born while laborer and villein were 

 equivalents ; or to the time when abject submission of each grade 

 to the grade above was thought the primary duty ; or to the time 

 when the good citizen of every rank was held bound to accept 

 humbly the appointed creed ; to see that the characters supposed 

 to be proper for men were unlike the characters we now suppose 

 proper for them. Nevertheless, the not-very-wise representatives 

 of electors who are mostly ignorant, are prepared, with papal 

 assumption, to settle the form of a desirable human nature, and 

 to shape the coming generation into that form. 



While they are thus confident about the thing to be done, they 

 are no less confident about the way to do it ; though in the last 

 case as in the first, the past proves to them how utter has been the 

 failure of the methods century after century pursued. Through- 

 out a Christendon full of churches and priests, full of pious 

 books, full of observances directed to fostering the religion of 

 love, encouraging mercy and insisting on forgiveness, we have 

 an aggressiveness and a revengefulness such as savages have 

 everywhere shown. And from people who daily read their bibles, 

 attend early services, and appoint weeks of prayer, there are sent 

 out messengers of peace to inferior races, who are forthwith ousted 

 from their lands by filibustering expeditions authorized in Down- 

 ing Street; while those who resist are treated as "rebels," the 

 deaths they inflict in retaliation are called " murders," and the 

 process of subduing them is named " pacification." 



At the same time that we thus find good reason to reject the 

 artificial method of molding citizens as wrong in respect alike of 

 end and means, we have good reason to put faith in the natural 

 method the spontaneous adaptation of citizens to social life. 



The organic world at large is made up of illustrations, infinite 

 in number and variety, of the truth that by direct or indirect pro- 

 cesses the faculties of each kind of creature become adjusted to 

 the needs of its life ; and further, that the exercise of each ad- 

 justed faculty becomes a source of gratification. In the normal 

 order not only does there arise an agent for each duty, but con- 

 sciousness is made up of the more or less pleasurable feelings 

 which accompany the exercise of these agents. Further, the im- 

 plication is that where the harmony has been deranged, it gradu- 

 ally re-establishes itself that where change of circumstances has 

 put the powers and requirements out of agreement, they slowly, 

 either by survival of the fittest or by the inherited effects of use 

 and disuse, or by both, come into agreement again. 



This law, holding of human beings among others, implies that 



